Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change

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Experiment... By its very nature, science and research involves experimentation. Over time, the experiments have changed in response to the different questions asked. Some experiments may be considered failures initially, but provide the sparks for revolutionary ideas and creative thinking. Because of experimentation, we have a better understanding of our world, leading to breakthrough scientific advances and inventions. Though the first successful flight in the polar regions occurred in 1914, airplanes were still considered somewhat experimental during the 1920s and 1930s. Shown here is a model of Richard E. Byrd’s Ford Tri-motor, used on his South Pole flight of 1929. Signed by Orville Wright, the chairman of the National Aeronautic Association of the United States of America, is Richard Byrd's pilot's license dated April 1927. Byrd successfully flew across the Atlantic to France later that year, just weeks after Charles Lindbergh. Byrd's Curtiss-Wright Condor was used on his Second Expedition to Antarctica from 1933 to 1935. This is the plane's license, indicating that its use was restricted for exploration purposes. This specimen bottle is one of only 500 made for Byrd’s First Expedition to Antarctica from 1928 to 1930. It was made by the Owens-Illinois glass company in Toledo, Ohio. These “silent messengers of science,” were used to contain messages placed into the ocean to arrive back to civilization. The messages contained information about where the bottles were released and the position of each bottle’s recovery was noted in an effort to study the intensity and direction of the ocean currents. In 1931, this press release was published by Sir Hubert Wilkins and Lincoln Ellsworth that announced the expedition to the Arctic with the submarine named Nautilus. This is a scale model of the Nautilus constructed by Guido Ciacci of Baybrook, Connecticut. Although the submarine was plagued with mechanical problems and did not reach its North Pole destination, the expedition did prove that submarine travel in the Arctic regions was possible. This photo shows the Nautilus submerging under the pack ice. In 1939, Thomas Poulter, Director of the Armour Institute of Chicago and a veteran of Byrd’s Second Expedition to Antarctica, designed and constructed a 30-ton wheeled vehicle known as the Snow Cruiser, for use with the U.S. Antarctic Service Expedition. The vehicle had many new features, including twin diesel engines, independent electric drive and steering on each of its four wheels, and a light aircraft carried on the roof. Unfortunately, the vehicle was a failure. It quickly became bogged down in the snow of Antarctica and never moved farther south than the expedition’s winter quarters. It was abandoned in Antarctica after the expedition, but was rediscovered during the International Geophysical Year 1958-1959. When a portion of the ice shelf broke off sometime in the 1960s, the Snow Cruiser went with it. It now lies somewhere on the bottom of the Southern Ocean. Notebooks like these are used as a tool for recording data and observations while in the field. Field and team personnel analyze the data upon their return to OSU. Some of the information taken from these particular notebooks is reproduced in the Institute’s Report Series. This June 2000 issue of Ice Sheets, a newsletter for the Byrd Polar Research Center, highlights the work of Ian Whillans and the Glacier Dynamics Group. Dr. Whillans used the “coffee can method” to measure the precise local rate of ice sheet thickness change with long term significance. Coffee cans were deployed in Greenland and Antarctica. Spear-headed by the Remote Sensing Lab, the Byrd Polar Research Center is a partner institution for the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, also known as CReSIS. In 2009, CReSIS participated in NASA's Operation IceBridge program that took radar and satellite measurements and images of the polar region. The image on the left shows the eight channels of the MCoRDS radar that allow for finer precision when mapping bedrock. On the right, the KU Ultra-Wide Band Radar measures the thickness of sea ice such as this cluster seen from the DC-8. The Arctic System Reanalysis, also known as ASR, is designated as an International Polar Year full project under the international Climate of the Arctic and its Role for Europe / Arctic System Reanalysis activity. The lead institution for this project is the Polar Meteorology Group of the Byrd Polar Research Center. The ASR is a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration that seeks to provide a high resolution description of the region's atmosphere, sea-ice, and land system by assimilating a diverse suite of observations into a regional model. Such a reanalysis may be considered an optimal blend of measurements and modeling. This figure is an example of the spatial coverage of the Arctic System Reanalysis.